


Tanith and Castor

by mosylu



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Childhood Friends, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, F/M, Flashbacks, Sort Of, smol Jyn and not-so-smol-but-not-very-tol Cassian sniping at each other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-23
Updated: 2018-08-23
Packaged: 2019-07-01 08:20:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,348
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15770232
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mosylu/pseuds/mosylu
Summary: They met once before, years ago, when she was a girl with poor shooting skills and he was a boy who needed a Core accent.When they meet again, Cassian pretends he doesn't remember her.At least, Jyn thinks he's pretending.





	Tanith and Castor

**Author's Note:**

  * For [youareiron_andyouarestrong](https://archiveofourown.org/users/youareiron_andyouarestrong/gifts).



> written for the AUgust prompt, "childhood friends"

Blasters weren’t her favorite weapon, but long ago, someone had told Jyn that she should be able to use any weapon she could get her hands on. Over the years, she’d extrapolated that to mean she should get her hands on any weapon she could. As advice, it had served her well.

So when she found a blaster in Cassian Andor’s things, she got her hands on it.

Of course, that snarky tattletale droid ratted her out, and of course Andor wanted it back. But she had it and she wasn’t letting it go.

“Give it to me,” he said.

She stared him down. “We’re going to Jedha. That’s a _war zone_.”

She studied him as they bickered over it, trying to categorize him, trying to work out where the soft spots were. If he had them.

He moved closer, blocking out the light from the windshield. Trying to intimidate her, maybe, with his greater size and their relative positions. But she had been small all her life and she wasn’t about to start being intimidated by that now.

His eyes flicked over her, to the blaster, to her hands, up to her face. He was trying to categorize her too.

She wondered if he was failing as much as she was.

“Trust goes both ways,” she told him, and while it had been a shot in the dark, it hit. She wondered how many people he trusted. She would bet it was a low number.

If he wanted her to trust him, he was going to have to extend her the same courtesy.

He gave a little huff, eyes sweeping over her one last time, and turned away.

Maybe it was the way the light struck across his eyes. Maybe it was the way he carried his shoulders. Whatever it was, Jyn found herself blurting, “Castor?”

He looked over his shoulder at her. “What?”

She stared at him, hard. “Castor,” she said again.

“I don’t know who you’re talking about,” he said, and turned away, clambering up into the cockpit.

She pressed her lips together, thinking, _I didn’t say it was a who._

* * *

 

_Ten years earlier_

The boy came upon her silently, a ghost dissolving out of the shadows. She almost shot him, and told him so. “You arse, I almost shot you.”

“Believe me, you didn’t,” he said calmly. “You were telegraphing.”

She scowled at him. She’d seen him with the man who’d come to talk to Saw, standing a little behind him. Kid? Assistant? “What are you doing snooping around?”

He shrugged. “Bored.”

He was about five years older than her. Sixteen or seventeen. Tall and almost painfully thin, dressed in some drab grey-green-brown that helped him fade into the background. There was something strange about his voice. She couldn’t place it.

His dark eyes were sharp as spurs. He wasn’t bored. She didn’t know why he’d come here, but it wasn’t to find something to do.

She decided she would pretend to believe him. She didn’t care anyway.

“Telegraphing,” she said, taking aim at the rocks on the far side of the cavern. “What’s that?”

He nodded at the blaster in her hands. “You take so long to aim and fire that everyone knows you’re coming.”

“Well, good. They should.” She set her jaw and fired, missing her tin-can target by a mile. She swore under her breath.

His brows went up. “That’s pretty filthy language for a little kid.”

She shot him a look. “I’m not a little kid.”

“You’re what - nine?”

“Eleven,” she said, and looked down her nose at him. Not easy; he was a clear half-meter taller than she was. “You’re, what - thirteen?”

He smiled a little at her, not taking the bait. “You want to learn to shoot?”

“Not really,” she said. “But Saw says I have to. I like my truncheon better.”

“You need to be close for a truncheon,” he said.

“That’s what he says. I can get close. I’m sneaky.”

“You’ll get bigger,” he said. “Maybe.”

She scowled at him.

“And you should be able to use any weapon you can get your hands on, not just your favorite.”

“Don’t tell me what to do,” she said, firing again, leaving a scorched black mark in the middle of a flat wall.

“What was that supposed to hit?”

“The next one will hit you.”

“Only if I’m standing behind you.”

She bared her teeth at him. “Go away.”

He settled himself on a rock. “Don’t think I will.”

“Why are you here, anyway?”

“Told you. Bored.”

“Not here here,” she said, firing again. It fried a patch of moss that began smoking gently. “Here in this camp.”

“Treyvas needed to consult with Saw.” He shrugged. “I didn’t want to stay on the ship.”

She finally put her finger on what it was about his voice. It was his accent.

It meandered all over the place. Sometimes he sounded like someone from a holo. Sometimes everything was softer, more rounded. Pleasantly rough, like the rock walls of the cavern. Sometimes he even sounded like her.

Sometimes that all happened in the same sentence.

That couldn’t be his real accent.

She turned on him. “Are you imitating me?”

He jolted infinitesimally. “What. No.”

“You are. You making fun of me?” She knew she had a mostly Core accent, which she’d gotten crap from some others for. _Sound like a damned Imp. Is that what you’re trying to be, little worm, an Imp?_

It was just her voice, that was all.

“No!”

“Fuck you,” she said, throwing her blaster to the ground and storming away.

“Wait,” he called. “Stop. Please?”

It was the _please_ that gave her pause. Please was not a word she heard much. She turned, glaring at him with all the force of her indignation.

He stared back, mouth tight, eyes uncertain.

She bared her teeth again and swung around to go.

“I am imitating you,” he said. “But it’s not to make fun. I promise.”

She went still.

His voice had changed utterly. The roundness, the roughness, the softness had welled up and spread itself across his words.

“I need a Core accent,” he said, still in that round/rough/soft voice. “I’m going … somewhere. And I need to sound like them.”

“Where are you going?”

He didn’t answer.

“So,” she said. “Watch a holo. Don’t creep around little girls.”

“Thought you weren’t a little girl. And I watched a lot of holos. Thought I had my accent down, but Treyvas says not. He says holo actors are all trained to sound like perfect Coruscanti nobility and nobody will believe me at - where I’m going. I need to sound like a real person, not someone who’s learned how to talk from a holo.”

She watched him.

“Just let me listen to you,” he said. “‘We’re here for two days. Let me talk and tell me when I don’t sound right.”

“Is that all?”

His hand moved toward his pocket, then dropped without slipping in. “Yes.”

“What’s in your pocket?”

His mouth worked a little. He reached in and pulled out a recorder. “So I can listen later. Just to the accent. I’m not a spy.”

She hadn’t thought he was until he said that.

She crossed her arms. “What’ll you give me?”

He looked at the blaster on the rough, uneven ground. “I’ll teach you how to shoot.”

“I know how to shoot. You point and you fire.”

His mouth curled up on the left side. “I’ll teach you how to hit things when you shoot.”

She sucked her teeth, considering. Saw really was being very annoying about it, and nobody had the the time to teach her. “What’s your name?”

“Call me Castor,” he said, in a reasonable Core accent. His true voice was gone. Almost. It whispered at the edge of the consonants, the ghost of the real him.

“That’s not really your name,” she said. “Is it?”

“It will be. What’s yours?”

“Tanith,” she said.

He was good enough not to look outwardly skeptical.

“Right,” she said. “Show me what to do, then.”

He picked up the blaster. “First off,” he said, “don’t throw one on the ground. That's a good way to shoot yourself or someone else in the kneecap.”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “Your ‘r’s are wrong,” she said, and they settled into their lessons.

* * *

 

_Now_

Cassian dragged himself awake. The sour-milk taste of bacta coated his tongue and teeth, and he knew from experience that it wouldn’t go away for a couple of hours yet, no matter how much water he drank or times he brushed his teeth.

They’d done it.

_Had_ they done it?

But he remembered Jyn pulling the lever to transmit the plans, the way she’d smiled at him, the way she’d fit under his arm to prop him up as they stumbled toward the elevator, pain rattling him from spine to fingertips with every step.

The way she’d looked at him on the way down.

The way they’d lurched out of the elevator, the plunge of his stomach at the sight of the Death Star, the way their arms had fit around each other on the beach. The way he’d thought, _If I have to go now, at least I’m stealing all the time with her that I possibly could._

And then as the pain of his injuries began to devour consciousness, he thought he’d heard the sound of a ship.

Unless the afterlife was full of bacta, machines, and the distinctively humid air of a Mon Cal cruiser, there had been a ship. One that had picked him up and taken him back to safety.

Had it picked Jyn up, too?

He managed to turn his head and got his answer. She was scrunched in a chair next to his bed, deeply asleep, her cheek resting on her shoulder. Knots of tension unwound from his stomach and between his shoulder blades and the small of his aching back.

She wore ill-fitting, Rebel issue clothing and her hair looked frizzled in odd patches. Her exposed cheek was red and shiny and faintly discolored from bacta. Lines of pain etched the corners of her eyes and bracketed her mouth, but she was upright and any bandages or splints were hidden beneath her clothes. Her scowl, even in sleep, made him smile.

She was a very good shot these days.

The first time she’d glared at him, he’d known who she was. It had surprised him. He was good with faces, but they’d spent all of two days together, ten years ago, bickering the whole time. And she’d been a child then; as much of a child as she was allowed to be.

He’d thought of himself as a man at the time, an adult indulging an unruly infant. But from this distance, he could identify the shreds of youth that had still hung about him at the time, soon to be burned away.

Her accent had saved his life at the Academy. Treyvas had been right; if he’d sounded like a holo actor, his first spy mission probably would have ended in an execution. But he’d sounded like a boy from the edge of the Core, his occasional slip-ups easier to explain away when they were couched in dropped letters and elisions that the holo actors would have died before using.

It had also taught him a much longer-lasting lesson: teachers, and information, could be found anywhere.

He thought of Chirrut Imwe and wondered if he’d made it out too.

He’d made no sound when he woke - that was a bad habit that had been trained out of him years ago - but a med droid came whirring over anyway. “Captain Andor, do not move.”

Jyn shifted in her chair, grumbling under her breath, before opening her eyes. They found his. “Cassian,” she said.

His throat hurt as if he’d inhaled smoke, or burning air. He didn’t try to speak. But he didn’t have to.

“It’s over,” she said. “The Death Star. It’s gone.”

The last of the tension eased out of his body. There was more to the story, he could hear it in her voice, but that was what he’d really wanted to know.

“Sergeant Erso, you are not permitted in this ward,” the med droid said. Most droids didn’t have a tone - _Kay,_ his heart mourned, _Kay_ \- so it was impossible to tell if they had said it before, but from Jyn’s glower, it didn’t look like her first time hearing it.

“I wasn’t bothering anyone.”

“You are still classified as recovering.”

“I’m fine,” she said. “I was asleep.”

“That chair is not conducive to productive rest. You must return to your own bunk.”

She let out a huff that turned into a deep, hacking cough. “Fine,” she gasped when the fit was done. “Fine, I’ll go.” She looked at Cassian. “I’ll be back.”

“Sergeant Erso, you are not permitted in this ward.”

“I heard you,” Jyn said, in a way that indicated she was going to ignore it anyway. She turned to go.

Cassian put out his hand and almost gasped with the spike of pain. The bacta had done well, but it wasn’t perfect, nor was it instantaneous.

Jyn stopped and turned back to him. “I will be back,” she promised in a low voice. “Try and keep me out.”

It made him smile again. But he wanted to say something else. “Ta- Tanith,” he managed, and the two syllables brought on a coughing fit that had the med droid pushing buttons, administering water, and making annoyed noises all at once.

When it subsided and the painkillers were doing their work on his aching chest and all the mending bones that the coughing fit had rattled, he looked back at her.

She looked down at him, and for a moment he thought she might deny it, the way he had. But that had been days ago, before … everything. Things were different now, with them.

Weren’t they?

Then her mouth curled up on the left side. “I knew you remembered me.”

FINIS


End file.
